The Broken Bow American Legion juniors baseball team stayed alive in the B6 Area Tournament Sunday night with a thrilling extra inning win over McCook 6-5 in 9 innings.
Broken Bow trailed 5-3 after five innings but scored a run in the sixth and another in the seventh to send the game into extra innings. In the top of the ninth, Broken Bow’s Tayte Thornton reached on an error to start the inning and was moved over to second base on a sacrifice bunt laid down by Kayden Record. Xack Lowry then walked to put runners at first and second. What followed next was craziness. Isaac O’Brien hit a high fly on the infield which failed to be caught. However, the infield fly rule was called for the second out of the inning. On the play, Lowry left first base and was caught in a rundown between first and second. During the rundown, Tayte Thornton came around to score before the tag out of Lowry occurred. Therefore, the run counted and Broken Bow took the lead 6-5 going to the bottom of the ninth.
In the bottom the ninth, the first two batters reached for McCook to put the tying run at second and the winning run at first. Trey Tiller of McCook then hit one up the middle which was handled by Broken Bow second baseman Owen Hartman who then tagged the runner out going to second base, and threw to first in time for a double play. During the play the McCook lead base runner advanced to third. The following McCook batter flew out to right field to end the game and keep Broken Bow’s tournament hopes alive.
Tayte Thornton was 3 for 5 with 2 runs scored and 1 RBI. Max Denson and Xack Lowry also had multi hit games for the Bow offense.
In other tournament action Sunday, Holdrege defeated Minden 22-0 in the winner’s bracket to advance to the championship round on Tuesday. Broken Bow will play Minden in an elimination game Monday night for the right to move on and play Holdrege for the tournament title. Monday’s game is scheduled for 6 p.m. and will be broadcast on KBBN 95.3 FM and kbbn.com. A live video stream of the game will also be available on the Sandhills Express You Tube channel and Sandhills Express Facebook page.
